November 18, 2009, 7-9 pm
@ The Guild Art Gallery
45 West 21 Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY
SAWCC is proud to present a panel discussion in conjunction with Domestic Policy, SAWCC’s 12th Annual Visual Arts Show. Domestic Policy covers a broad range of issues, including business, education, energy, health care, law enforcement, money and taxes, natural resources, social welfare, and personal rights and freedoms. The purpose of the discussion is to engage, debate and discuss works in the exhibition in this context.
Panelists: Rocio Aranda Alvarado, Dr. Gayatri Gopinath, Vandana Jain, Divya Mehra, Sadia Rehman
Moderated by: Dr. Radhika Subramaniam
Rocio Aranda Alvarado is Associate Curator, Special Projects at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. She also works on independent projects, including a group show of emerging artists titled Hair Tactics for Jersey City Museum in 2010 and exhibitions for the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance of New York. She is also currently on the faculty of the Art Department at the City College of New York.
Aranda Alvarado has been invited to speak at the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Arts Initial Public Offerings program and the Americas Society. Her writing has appeared in catalogue essays for the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and El Museo del Barrio, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Nexus, Review, the journal of the Americas Society, NYFA Quarterly, BOMB and American Art.
Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor, Program Director, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Impossible Dreams: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Her articles on the politics of Bollywood, Bhangra music, sexuality, and diaspora have been published in Social Text, positions: east asia cultures critique, Journal of Homosexuality, and Diaspora. She is the recipient of various fellowships including the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Vandana Jain is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. She studied studio art and art history at New York University, and textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her recent awards include the LMCC Workspace Residency, the 2007 Emerging Artists Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park. She has shown at a variety of venues, including Toronto Free Gallery, the Queens Museum, ABC No Rio, Momenta and the Soap Factory. Her work was recently included in the 798 Biennial is Beijing. Jain’s work parses the corporate symbols that surround us. Ostensibly meant to serve as brand markers so we can distinguish between different producers of the same goods, these symbols have the potential to reveal so much more about our inner desires.
Divya Mehra is a multimedia artist who recently earned an MFA from Columbia University, New York. She obtained her BFA with Honors from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. In her practice she explores issues of cultural displacement and hybridization, deploying a humorous perspective in the execution of the works. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions and screenings across North America. Mehra’s work uses humor to activate repressed impulses, disrupt convention, and explore power relations in terms of gender and sexuality, as well as racial and cultural identities.
Sadia Rehmanwas born in Queens, New York. Her works have been exhibited both, internationally and nationally, at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art, Abrons Arts Center, and Exit Art. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of Art (New York, 2008) and National Gallery of Art (Islamabad, 2006). She lives, works, and drinks tea in Brooklyn, NY. Rehman’s work proposes hypothetical narratives and references personal experiences and observations fused with a historical knowledge of her own self.
Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor and writer based in New York. She is presently the Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design where she is also assistant professor of Art and Design History and Theory. Her recent projects include Art in Odd Places (co-curated with Erin Donnelly, October 2009) Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008), Rods and Cones: Seeing from the Back of One’s Head (Guest curated for the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, 2008) and a major two-year international initiative Cities, Art and Recovery (LMCC, 2005-2006) focused on the work of art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. Subramaniam was also the founding and Executive Editor of an interdisciplinary art journal, Connect:art.politics.theory.practice, published by Arts International.